Prosthetic Limbs With Electronic Skin May Be Just Around The Corner

Will 2016 Be The Year Of The Cyborg?

Why Is This Important?

Because we may be about to overcome the final barrier to producing prosthetic limbs that look and feel like the real thing.

Long Story Short

Researchers in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa (Israel) have developed a synthetic polymer that mimics human skin’s capacity to heal itself.

Long Story

Prosthetic limbs have come a long way over the last ten years. And with the development of better and more lifelike robotics, we’re starting to move towards a future where prostheses might one day become indistinguishable from the real thing.

But one of the last great barriers left for the industry to overcome is the capacity for these replacement body parts to interact with the real world like human skin. The sense of touch is the most important, allowing wearers to feel their environment.

Flexible sensors are of course nothing new. They’ve been around for years now, used in consumer electronics, robotics, health care and space flight. But their usefulness has always been offset by a susceptibility to damage — even a minor scratch has the potential to ruin a sensor.

But that might be about to change. Researchers in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa (Israel) were inspired by the healing properties of human skin, managing to develop materials that can be integrated into flexible devices to “heal” incidental damage that might compromise device functionality.

Key is a new kind of synthetic polymer that has self-healing properties that mimic human skin. The team’s new ‘e-skin’ can heal itself in a ridiculously short period of time — less than a day in most cases. The larger sensor is comprised of the self-healing substrate, high conductivity electrodes, and molecularly modified gold nanoparticles.

The polymer substrate works across a wide range of temperatures, and once healed still illustrates an impressive sensitivity to touch. What’s more, the electrode resistance increases after healing and can survive 20 times or more cutting/healing cycles than prior to healing. Essentially, healing makes the sensor even stronger.

“The vulnerability of flexible sensors used in real-world applications calls for the development of self-healing properties similar to how human skin heals,” self-healing sensor co-developer Prof. Hossam Haick told the American Technion Society. “Accordingly, we have developed a complete, self-healing device in the form of a bendable and stretchable chemiresistor where every part — no matter where the device is cut or scratched — is self-healing.”

The researchers are currently experimenting with carbon-based self-healing composites and self-healing transistors. Roll on, science.